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Climate change and the grim logic of collective action

JH

By Joseph Heath

Sun., Dec. 20, 2015timer6 min. read

Have I told you about the time that I almost got punched in the face by a Newfoundlander? I lead a quiet life, so this doesn’t happen to me often. But I was talking to a friend of mine, who comes from Corner Brook, and I said something very wrong. Wrong enough that I began to fear for my safety.

For some reason we were talking about the sorry state of the fishing industry, and the impact it had on various members of her family. It was then that I made the awful mistake of suggesting that Newfoundlanders themselves might have had something to do with the overfishing that led to the collapse of the cod stocks.

The way she looked at me, I quickly realized that I had said something terrible, so terrible that I began to worry about getting punched. Yet she managed to maintain her composure, and over the course of the next 15 minutes, settled for explaining to me in very careful and precise detail exactly how much of an idiot I was.

You see, it turns out that the collapse of the cod stocks in the Grand Banks had nothing — absolutely nothing — to do with Newfoundlanders, or even Canadians for that matter. It was all the fault of the Spanish and Portuguese. They were the ones fishinsg without quotas, using illegal nets, and so on. If it hadn’t been for the foreign fleet, everything would have been fine.

I nodded politely for long enough to escape the conversation. But just out of interest, I contacted a student of mine who was studying in Lisbon, and suggested that she ask around a bit, to see who the Portuguese consider responsible for the collapse of the Grand Banks cod fishery. The answer that came back was unsurprising — the Portuguese, it turns out, bore no responsibility whatsoever, it was all the fault of the Canadians.

Here’s the amazing thing about these two perspectives — there’s a sense in which they’re both correct. Overfishing is a classic example of what economists call a “tragedy of the commons,” a type of social trap in which people pursuing their own interests nevertheless act in ways that are collectively self-defeating. One of the things that makes these traps so devilishly difficult to escape is that, due to the very structure of the interaction, the harms that you suffer are always someone else’s fault. The fact that everyone can always blame someone else is one of the reasons that it’s so hard to convince anyone to stop what they’re doing.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, because climate change is also a tragedy of the commons, one that has almost exactly the same structure as overfishing of the cod. It would be nice if the climate story had a slightly happier ending than the fishing one. And yet if you look at the excuses people are trotting out for doing nothing — “China and India are bringing new power plants online every day, so what’s the point of anything we do?” — you can see the grim logic of the collective action problem at work.

Just to be clear: a tragedy of the commons arises when an action that generates individual benefit for the person doing it has a negative byproduct effect on others. When everyone does it, they all wind up worse off than if they all stopped, and yet no one has any incentive to stop, and even if you can convince them that they should stop, no one will want to until everyone else does.

Overfishing is like that. Suppose you’re operating a fishing boat. If you secretly catch a half-tonne too many fish, it reduces the breeding stock, so that next season there will perhaps be five tonnes fewer fish to catch. And yet it’s not you who suffers that five-tonne loss, it gets spread out over the entire fleet — with every boat bringing in maybe just a few grams less. So you have no individual incentive to stop what you’re doing.

Of course, you probably will notice that every year your catch is declining, or that you have to travel further out, and trawl for longer, to fill your hold. Whose fault is that? Your own overfishing can hardly be blamed for the decline you’re seeing — it’s everyone else overfishing that’s causing the problem. As long as they’re not stopping, it would be ridiculous for you to stop. After all, you’ve got a family to feed. And so the grim logic of the collective action problem continues.

Consider now the case of climate change. The big fad in my downtown Toronto neighbourhood right now is to install so-called “snow melt” systems in the front walk and driveway. These are basically heating coils embedded in the concrete, usually run by a second natural-gas furnace that is installed on the property. To say that these are environmentally irresponsible would be a rather gross understatement.

And yet if you can afford it, why not get yourself a heated driveway? After all, who likes to get up in the morning and shovel out the car? Or the front steps for that matter? Of course you are burning fossil fuel in order to run this system, and Canadians are currently burning, on average, 10 times more fossil fuel than we ought to, if we want to maintain a stable atmospheric carbon stock. But the negative consequences of burning that fuel are experienced almost entirely by others, sometime in the distant future.

Environmentalists sometimes make the mistake of thinking that climate change is a consequence of people behaving “irrationally.” They imagine that if we just paid more attention to the science, or watched Al Gore’s slide show, that we would mend our ways. Unfortunately, this is not how collective action problems are solved. After all, it’s not as though people in Newfoundland didn’t notice that there was a problem with the cod stocks, or that scientists didn’t warn them. The problem is that it wasn’t in anyone’s individual interest to change their behaviour.

As a result, it is easy to overstate the importance of climate change “denialism,” or to imagine that we just need better education. The problem is not that people have the wrong beliefs, it is that they have the wrong incentives. That is why, in order to solve the problem, we need to change those incentives — first and foremost, by putting a price on carbon, so that people cannot just ignore the negative byproducts that their actions produce.

From this perspective, the constant finger-pointing at China and India, or the claim that Canada only contributes 2 per cent of global greenhouse gases emissions, is not a good argument against taking action, it is merely a symptom of the trap that we are stuck in. It’s like my friend from Corner Brook blaming the Spanish and Portuguese for the collapse of the cod stocks. The superficial plausibility of this way of thinking is part of what makes the problem so difficult to solve.

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This is why the agreement struck last week in Paris is important. Unlike many global problems, which can be eliminated piecemeal, the structure of climate change is such that it really does require the co-operation of all nations to resolve. If no one is willing to stop until everyone else does, then the only option is to say “all together now!” The compromises that must be made along the way, in order to get everyone to act together, are guaranteed to leave many people unsatisfied and distrustful. The alternative, however, is another two decades of useless recrimination and finger-pointing.

Joseph Heath is a professor in the School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Toronto.

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